Inside a New Institute Dedicated to Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business
Credit: Cal Cary / The Washington Post / Getty Images- The University of Virginia Darden School of Business launched the LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business in September.
- The new institute aims to both boost AI research and teaching.
- Employers say AI is going to grow in importance as a skill for business graduates over the next few years.
- They also say that human skills, like strategic thinking and decision-making and others championed by Darden, will continue to be critical for students.
The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has brought with it an equally rapid rise in ethical questions across all sectors of the global economy. Now, one of the country’s top business schools hopes to address those AI ethics dilemmas with a new institute.
The University of Virginia (UVA) Darden School of Business launched the LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business in September to tackle some of those pressing AI ethics issues and prepare students for high-stakes business decisions.
Businesses are faced with concerns about bias in AI and how to ethically use it in business decisions as they scramble to implement the high-demand technology.
Darden Professor of Business Administration Yael Grushka-Cockayne, one of the new institute’s academic directors, told BestColleges that the school’s long-standing expertise in business ethics still applies to rapidly emerging AI.
“The same principles that guide ethical decision-making in other settings are applicable here,” Grushka-Cockayne said in an interview.
AI will empower business leaders to work with and leverage huge amounts of data to make decisions, Grushka-Cockayne said, but fundamental business skills like strategic thinking and decision-making will still be key for students.
“You can’t follow anything blindly, whether it’s coming from a human position or an algorithm,” Grushka-Cockayne said.
Human skills like communication and strategic thinking are a top priority for employers — and will continue to be even as demand for AI is on the rise.
Employers indicated in a recent Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) report that, while AI skills are going to increase in importance in the coming years, fundamental human skills will continue to be highly valued.
The new institute aims to help students, researchers, and business leaders take a critical approach to AI.
That will include supporting both teaching and research efforts, and Grushka-Cockayne underscored the importance of taking an interdisciplinary approach to addressing AI and other emerging trends.
That will mean leveraging not only Darden’s resources but also other experts from across the University of Virginia.
Grushka-Cockayne said there’s a massive need for people from across disciplines to come together to address the complicated ethical issues that AI brings to the table. The institute’s experts include both business faculty and faculty from the UVA School of Data Science with a wide variety of subject matter expertise and backgrounds.
“Business leaders are like translators,” Grushka-Cockayne said. “They often find themselves at the intersection of many different units in an organization. I think that’s true today, and it’s very obvious to those that are following that you can’t silo any function in an organization.”
The new Darden institute is only the latest in the high-power business school’s push for AI. Darden alum David LaCross and his wife, Kathleen, have donated more than $100 million to the school in recent years to help bolster its AI efforts.
Grushka-Cockayne underscored the importance of employers and business leaders, both from Darden’s vast alumni network and its many partners, in informing the new institute’s work.
“We have companies coming and talking to us about the task forces that they’ve put together, the frameworks that they’ve developed, the algorithms that they’re setting up,” Grushka-Cockayne said.
“We’re enjoying documenting some of that and bringing it into our ecosystem so that we can benefit both on the research side and also on the teaching side.”
AI’s rapid emergence has translated to high demand from students, as well as a surge of new programs and institutes at some of the nation’s top business schools.
The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania recently announced plans to ramp up its investments in AI. And other schools like American University’s Kogod School of Business have opted to infuse AI throughout their curricula.
Part of the challenge of teaching AI, however, is its constantly evolving nature.
“There’s a high degree of ambiguity, and we don’t even know what the question will be tomorrow,” Grushka-Cockayne said. “We don’t know the use case, or we don’t exactly know the nuances of how the AI is going to be deployed.”
Grushka-Cockayne said tried-and-true innovation strategies within business education will be vital to helping students embrace both AI and other technologies that will emerge throughout their careers.
Successfully adapting to AI and handling those ethical issues means listening to experts, breaking down silos, and bringing stakeholders together — the same approach as the new LaCross Institute.
“That’s something that we would do on a regular basis, but it’s even more relevant now in this context,” she said.